What sucks, who sucks and you suck

Slashdot Smartarses, Dontcha Hate 'Em?

2000-09-18

Slashdot smartarses, dontcha hate ‘em? Always ready to reply to Ask Slashdot queries with something like: > “Don’t be so pathetic and useless, Linux is designed to be hacked to do what you want! A High Availability solution is easy: just use ifconfig to move the IP, then install your app on a shared disk (which is trivial to set up in Linux). You could add some basic heartbeating to monitor the active server if you want extra reassurance, perhaps using SCSI target mode across the disk link. You would only need a few scripts and a brand new disk driver - simple!”Where the hell are these people on the Linux-HA list then?! So bloody clever, it seems, at dashing off all the vital enterprise features missing from it at present, such as volume managers, HA, hot swap hardware drivers and journalling filesystems. The fact that most of this stuff only exists, if at all, as experimental, prototype or pseudo- code, surely indicates that we must currently have a bunch of complete bozos working on them. Honestly, can’t they even write a new set of drivers in a day?? (Well, someone probably did but Linus changed the API the day after.)

There appear to be a staggering number of individuals on the Linux scene, whom I have come to identify as “probable bullshitters”, ever willing to casually mention some fearfully complicated, bleeding edge project that they’re currently engaged upon. It does their descriptive powers credit that they are able to make these tasks sound so awesomely godlike, but perhaps not so much their real skills when all they are doing, once you strip away the jargon, make a few informed guesses and - occasionally - have insider knowledge, is installing a standard application and performing a little reconfiguration that is only slightly outside the box.

E.g.: “I’ve pioneered a new technique in media data extraction via a powerful backend algorithmic sorting mechanism. It was tough but thankfully I am blessed with the powers of a minor divinity. No no, don’t kneel. Just bow your heads slightly and I will anoint thee.” Means: “I’ve hooked my MP3 player up to an Oracle database, using an open source util.”

And if they have managed to achieve something on their own, you can bet that another tool easily locatable via Freshmeat will do the same thing much more elegantly and can be set up in half the time. But then I guess the gods Create rather than Reuse, don’t they?